WROUGHT LEATHER 
AS A MEDIUM OF DECORATION 
By HELEN W. HENDERSON 
A NY effort to revive the art of wrought 
i leather as practiced by the ancients in 
interior decoration, must necessarily find 
root in the tangible results which have sur¬ 
vived the centuries and which still testify to 
the accomplishment of those early workers, 
though of the technical manner and traditions 
of their craft little or no record is discover¬ 
able. In the conscientious effort to reproduce 
the old methods, what is now known of the 
process has been re-discovered step by step 
through years of patient experiment, and it 
stands for the only substantial information 
to be had on what are believed to be the 
ancient means of tooling, gilding and color¬ 
ing the hides. 
In the courage and strength of the few 
isolated cases of men and women who are 
seeking to revitalize the craft lies its only 
chance of a real renaissance. 
The art which held so high a place in the 
industry of many hundreds of years degen¬ 
erated and finally died at the close of the 
eighteenth century. Literature current dur¬ 
ing the life of the handicraft reveals but sparse 
information to 
the student or 
antiquarian 
who would 
seek to ex¬ 
plore the an¬ 
nals of that 
time. A por¬ 
tion of a vol¬ 
ume belong¬ 
ing to a series, 
published in 
the last part of 
the eighteenth 
century, gives 
an account of 
the art in its 
decadence, al¬ 
most at its 
death, and is 
thus replete 
with information on the various methods, 
then rife, of cheapening the process and de¬ 
grading the noble work. Baron Charles 
Davillier is the author of a small volume called 
Notes sur les Cuirs de Cordoue , published in 
Paris in 1878, which modern workers have 
found helpful as the most intelligent book 
bearing on the craft to be had in America. 
The earliest trace of the leather work now 
called “ Cordovan,” is credited to the Afri¬ 
can Moors, who, before the eleventh century, 
introduced the craft into Spain. The Span¬ 
ish word for these leathers, “ Guadamacil,” 
forms the link by which Baron Davillier 
traces their ancestry back to Ghadames, an 
African village on the edge of the Sahara; 
and in support ot his theory, quotes a 
twelfth century writer of Tunis who speaks 
of the even then famous leathers of Ghadames. 
Certainly the gilded leather industry swept 
all of Spain into a vortex of picturesque 
activity which flourished steadily from the 
fourteenth to the end of the sixteenth cen¬ 
turies and made Cordova, Barcelona and 
Seville centers of wealth and commerce, 
while the 
smaller Span¬ 
ish towns, in 
only less de¬ 
gree, thrived 
and were 
happy in the 
success of a 
glorious work 
which fed an 
apparently in¬ 
satiable mark¬ 
et. The Cor¬ 
dovan work¬ 
ers, in particu¬ 
lar, became so 
famous for the 
splendor and 
variety of their 
leathers that 
the name 
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